Wholehearted Faith by Rachel Held Evans

Author:Rachel Held Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2021-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

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It’s one thing to say that Jesus was willing to die. The question many of us have wrestled with is slightly different: Why did Jesus have to die?

In my childhood understanding of sin and Jesus’s intervention, Christ substituted his beauty for my ugliness, his perfection for my flaws. It was as if the mere thought of me would be so unbearable and enraging to a holy God that my only salvation would be if someone held up a photo of me and God somehow saw a picture of Jesus instead. Despite God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and omni–everything else, was the very sight of me so bad?

So many hymns and songs concretize this understanding of God’s anger, wrath, and utter disappointment—until Jesus. There’s “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus”: “Naught of good that I have done / Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Or “In Christ Alone”: “Till on that cross as Jesus died / The wrath of God was satisfied.”

I am sure that some critic out there will read this and think, Oh, there she goes again—Rachel Held Evans with her heretical ways, Rachel Held Evans elevating humanity and diminishing the divine, Rachel Held Evans tempting the vulnerable with her confusions. If it’s heretical to ask questions about the nature of God’s love or the love of God’s nature, then let me be a heretic. If it’s heretical to muse about the incongruence of a patient God who exists beyond time being infuriated by my little errors, then let me be a heretic. If it’s heretical to wonder what the proper pronouns might be for God, then let me be a heretic (once, I used a feminine pronoun for God, and people still point to that as a reason to wish me a hasty death, which makes me wonder how they’ll feel when they enter God’s full presence someday and learn that God isn’t a dude).

I’m just trying to see humanity for what it is—and God for who God is. And better the confusion that vulnerability might engender and the lack of clarity—one might more charitably call it humility—about atonement theories than the false certainty that has kept so many bound to their self-loathing and their sense of being unlovable to God.

To be clear, I’m not trying to construct a new certainty, a more enlightened fundamentalism, to replace the old versions. That would just be a slightly prettier idol than the one we had before. My hope instead is to urge us toward faithful wondering: What if some of the stories we’ve been telling ourselves, well intentioned as they might be, should be shelved as fiction? What if those narratives need to be put to death so that something more nourishing, something centered on holy flourishing, something truer, might live?

We are not the first to go this way. In the Jewish tradition, there’s a long history of faithful wondering. It’s summarized in the midrash, ancient commentaries by the rabbis that contain their speculations about what lies off the page of Scripture, about all the details that didn’t make the main scroll.

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